In spite of his drive home in the small hours he had started out early the next morning for a long tramp. Sleep--how could a man sleep with that April moonlight in his veins? The moon that was everywhere--caught in pearly puffs on the shadbush branches, scattered in ivory drifts of wild plum bloom, tipping the grasses of the wayside with pale pencillings, sheeting the recesses of the woodland with pools of icy silver. A freezing burning magic, into which a man plunged, and came out cold and aglow, to find everything about him as unreal and incredible as himself... After the blatant club restaurant, noise, jazz, revolving couples, Japanese lanterns, screaming laughter, tumultuous good-byes, this white silence, the long road unwinding and twisting itself up again, blind faces of shuttered farmhouses, black forests, misty lakes--a cut through a world in sleep, all dumb and moon-bemused... The contrast was beautiful, intolerable... Sleep? He hadn't even gone to bed. Just plunged into a bath, and stretched out on his lounge to see the dawn come. A mysterious sight that, too; the cold fingers of the light remaking a new world, while men slept, unheeding, and imagined they would wake to some familiar yesterday. Fools! He breakfasted--ravenously--before his wife was down, and swung off with a couple of dogs on a long tramp, he didn't care where. Even the daylight world seemed unimaginably strange: as if he had never really looked at it before. He walked on slowly for three or four miles, vaguely directing himself toward Greystock. His long tramps as a boy, in his farming days, had given him the habit of deliberate steady walking, and the unwonted movement refreshed rather than tired him--or at least, while it tired his muscles, it seemed to invigorate his brain. Excited? No--just pleasantly stimulated... He stretched himself out under a walnut tree on a sunny slope, lit his pipe and gazed abroad over fields and woods. All the land was hazy with incipient life. The dogs hunted and burrowed, and then came back to doze at his feet with pleasant dreamings. The sun on his face felt warm and human, and gradually life began to settle back into its old ruts--a comfortable routine, diversified by pleasant episodes. Could it ever be more, to a man past fifty? But after a while a chill sank on his spirit. He began to feel cold and hungry, and set out to walk again. Presently he found it was half-past eleven--time to be heading for home. Home; and the lunch-table; Pauline; and Nona; and Lita. Oh, God, no--not yet... He trudged on, slowly and sullenly, deciding to pick up a mouthful of lunch somewhere by the way.